There is something especially unmanly about a man who supports abortion rights. It isn’t only that to support abortion today is just too easy – and it is easy, especially for a young person subject to the pressure of their peers, and at a university.

Men ought to hold themselves to a higher standard and show some resistance to the trends of the day. But the ease of supporting abortion is not the worst of it.

Rather, at its worst, a man who advocates for abortion is essentially acting against the masculine imperative, which is to protect and to be a father. In other words, abortion is contrary to the rules of chivalry, since abortion is the chief means of the exploitation of women by men.

Of course, I can imagine why a man might support abortion. But I don’t need to imagine why a man would oppose it.

Fathers Matter

Father’s Day is upon us. The celebration of this day, which has its roots in Saint Joseph’s Day, underscores the point that fatherhood does indeed matter. Good father matter. Bad ones matter even more.

The importance of fatherhood has not been given its due in recent times. And it is important; for example, in 2013, the Prison Reform Trust reported that 76% of young men in prison in England and Wales had an absent father; while, in 2019, the Office of National Statistics revealed that 2.9 million children in the UK live in lone-parent families (usually with the mother).

While the absence of fathers is a blight on our society, the discrimination against men who are good fathers or want to be fathers, across the globe, is blatant and undeniable.  

Last month, SPUC reported on the case of a father in Argentina who begged a court to stop the abortion of his son. “All I’m asking is that you respect my son’s life”, he said to the court.

The man, named Franco, explained that, since the mother did not want the child, he proposed that she allow him to raise the child. She refused, as did the court, allowing the abortion to take place.

As Franco said at the time, “Everything is focused on women’s rights, but my child also has rights, and no one can make a decision concerning him. I have already presented everything I have to the court. Now I hope, please understand, that I just want to give my child the chance to live.”

Apart from taking the life of an innocent child, Argentine law, which now permits abortion for any reason up to 14 weeks, since legalisation last year, wholly excludes the father from the decision. Of course, this isn’t to suggest that abortion would be fine if the father also agreed to it. It wouldn’t be.

Still, such an appalling state of affairs, present in other nations, including the UK, treats an unborn child as the property of the mother – or at least an object held within the bounds of her own property, her body. The irony, here, of course, is that feminists have often complained that for centuries women have been treated as “property”. But today, title, rather than obligation, underscores abortion.

The Better Man

The Franco case underlines the glaring contradiction at the centre of abortion, which is that it enables bad men, underwriting their selfish and unchivalrous actions, putting women at increased risk of having to go through with the procedure.

And men are aware. A 2008 study of abortion in the United States reported that in 82% of abortion cases the father knew that the pregnancy had resulted in an abortion. 

Unquestionably, the actor Marlon Brando knew, when he arranged an abortion for his lover, the actress Rita Moreno, with whom he was having an affair. Moreno later attempted suicide.

Comparing Brando with Franco, who was more manly? Brando is an icon of "masculinity", of course, which is part of the problem. Modern society makes idols out of sex symbols, while fathers of substance such as Franco, seeking to do right, are undermined and soon forgotten.

Ultimately, it is the unborn, as well as women, who suffer because of this disordered, but sadly influential, understanding of what masculinity really is.

Flesh vs. Spirit

Materialism is the great malady of the age, which has infected both genders. One terrible manifestation of this modern disorder is the treatment of women, usually by men (but not always), as flesh objects.

Pornography represents the human body divested of its spiritual element, in particular – in other words, the person’s soul.

The making of the person into a commodity extends to both genders, made worse by the rise of dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble, where the individual is, for the most part, assessed on outward appearances. And this “swipe left” culture is corrosive, casually discarding souls, almost without a thought, on the most superficial grounds.

The truth, espoused by Aquinas and others, that the body is an extension of the soul, has largely been lost in recent times. The result is that men – but increasingly women, too – view the opposite sex as an object to be enjoyed and discarded at will and without concern.  

The same rule has generally been applied to the unborn, too, of course, viewed by many as merely an object to be got rid of, if unwanted. The notion of an unborn child’s humanity, which is ultimately a spiritual value rather than a biological categorisation, has been replaced by its cold classification as a foetus.

Chivalry: The “Realistic” View of The Sexes

This depreciation of spirit has also all but eradicated the once exalted concept of chivalry, itself a spiritual and, I would argue, masculine value, as well as being one of the great treasures of Christianity. As G. K. Chesterton wrote: “The paradox of charity or chivalry [is] that the weaker a thing is the more it should be respected, that the more indefensible a thing is the more it should appeal to us for a certain kind of defence.”

Accordingly, “Chivalry is not the romantic, but the realistic, view of the sexes.”

But chivalry, which, as I have said elsewhere, was in a sense killed off by the advent of the contraceptive pill in 1967. And its death undercut what had been the single woman’s best defence against casual sex: unwanted pregnancy outside of marriage.

So, one might ask, what use is chivalry today? What is its relevance, especially on Father’s Day?

A Better Man

Last weekend, the first-ever Men’s March against abortion in Washington D.C. took place. 300 good men turned out to stand against abortion. As Father Stephen Imbarrato, the organiser of the event, said: “Every abortion wounds a woman, and a man is involved in every single abortion.”

Every man is necessarily involved in an abortion, this is true. And one way for men to reduce abortion – especially when men are excluded from the abortion debate – is to be chivalrous; meaning that a man should do his utmost to not place a woman in a position of even having to consider an abortion. And even should a pregnancy occur, that man can still embrace the mission of fatherhood.

To tackle abortion, a man must first make himself better. Indeed, all that chivalry really entailed, at its outset over a thousand years ago, was a thin veneer of Christian charity applied to the rough hide of the barbarian warrior. Only later would the barbarian be transformed into the medieval knight – and more recently, the gentleman.

In this sense, a man, the uncouth warrior, is a rough hunk of rock that holds within itself an ideal shape, manhood, which must be hewn and polished until its ultimate form is finally realised. And every man is a work in progress, though he would do well to know what he is progressing towards.

The essential point to this, of course, is that the best of men is inherent in themselves – as protectors and, in that sense, fighters who have learnt discipline, as well as gaining meaning from the mission, especially the mission of ridding the world of violence, which is what abortion is – an act of violence.

A Return to Masculinity

A dire new phrase, “toxic masculinity”, has emerged in recent years – an assault on the very nature of men. The problem with the world, the problem with men, it is said, is that they are just too manly. But the opposite is true. When male behaviour turns “toxic”, it is no longer masculine; the man is no longer chivalrous; he is no longer manly.

Men have a duty of care towards women – and women, too, have a duty, which is to provide their children, especially their sons, with a father. The absence of male role models is, indeed, self-perpetuating. While I think the term “toxic masculinity” is a nonsensical slur, and even misandrist, I cannot help thinking that such a phrase is a failure of men, a failure of spirit, constantly ceding to the whims of the flesh, engendering a world of “toxic” hurt and cynicism.    

The answer to this cannot be to extract whatever remains of a man’s masculinity.

If chivalry is to mean anything today, then surely it must mean men returning to masculinity, which is fundamentally a spiritual value; also recognising that the greatest acts of chivalry may be, and usually are, wholly unspectacular in action. But they may make all the difference, particularly in the long term.

Chivalry is a term considered archaic and even embarrassing, an outmoded, antique ideal that, if it ever truly existed, died centuries ago. But remember, the modern age – the age of abortion, the age of unwarranted violence on the unborn, the age of the misuse of women and their bodies and souls – this age has a vested interest in making a man believe that chivalry is absurd.

But let us be clear, a terrible, unprecedented crime is taking place against the unborn, as well as against women, across the world, right now.

Chivalry is dead, we killed it; most of all because we no longer believe in it. This may be true, perhaps. And we must all take responsibility for this. But as a Christian, I also believe in resurrection, that the dead may, indeed, live again. An ideal is never dead if just one man holds true to it.

Be that man. Be the man, be the father, that you were born to be.